There is only darkness until I click the slide projector on. It shows a building. The structure is classical, it has columns that speak of ancient times, but there is a streamlined aspect to it. One might say simplified, one might say bold, one might say stripped down; the latter like a human skeleton, a beautiful, essential work, but menacing.

She doesn't ask any questions. I was hoping she would start and I could answer. Instead, I have to plunge on by myself.

I click the next slide, and the next, establishing a rhythm of images to back up my voice. "Buildings and monuments. Places to live and work, but also places to shape ideas, no? I figure you would know as well as anyone."

Still no word from her. Smoke from her cigarette holder curls up into the projector's light- a cigarette? I don't remember letting her have a cigarette. How did she get it? She is determined to be unsettling.

"Evoking traditional values, but with a few cues here and there- the alienation of De Chirico, the strength of Perret- that harken a control of the future. But we don't want Il Duce's future, nor those trying to usher it in unaware of the childish irony of their nostalgia-fueled vision. We are here to see to it that it remains a stillbirth."

She blows a plume of smoke. "You people are aware, I'm not an assassin." It is both a statement and a questioning of our good sense.

"Of course!" I hold up a hand. I click to the final slide, a mosaic image showing all the previous images together. They have the lighting of mugshots. "That is not the intentions of our department."

"Then?" I can't read her expression. The hat already shades her face, in this room her features become invisible.

"Then- well, then, you see," I'm rambling a bit. I rally. "You see, you and I, to combat this in our own way-"

I sweep my hand towards the image of the buildings, their angles and corners carrying sullen expressions, haughty bearings, criminals who think they can't be caught.  The movement of my arm casts a shadow across them.

"You and I, Miss Sandiego, are going to steal the entire canon of fascist architecture!"

Raymond Chandler

It was late, and I was writing. My latest story didn't seem to be going anywhere- as usual, my beginning was strong, but I'd petered out early. Just what was I going to have happen next?       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He pointed it directly at me, and I was too startled to do anything but stare at him- I couldn't turn around in my seat, I was afraid to move, all I could do was crane my head back with wide eyes. He looked at me with a scowl, the gun barrel like the eye of a cyclops, and opened his mouth to speak.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He pointed his gun at me, then spotted the first man and pointed the gun at him, then started to wave between the two of us, backing up to keep both of us covered. The first gunman kept his gun on me, but his attention on the intruder, as both men sized each other up. I swallowed as I waited to see what would happen next.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He barged in as if ready to break all hell loose, then stopped short and looked surprised at the two others already present. He didn't point his gun but rather held it upwards at the ready, eyes darting between possible targets. The first gunman who'd had me covered was now lowering his gun, sucking at his teeth as he considered the new situation. I breathed a sigh of relief and started to turn in my chair, moving to face the situation and ease the strain in my neck. "Well." said the first gunman. "I-"       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       All of us turned to look at him where he stood in the frame of my bedroom door, my bedroom very clearly behind him with no other entrances into it. He looked like he'd just come in out of the rain, his hair was slick with wetness and clung to his face, and he raised his gun and cocked the hammer.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He bumped into the third man, who blinked and moved aside with a small note of apology. The former nodded and shrugged and pushed past him to get into the room, then looked at the others, then peered back into the entrance hall as if checking for something. He shrugged, then raised his gun, pointing at the second gunman, who pointed back, looking thankful. The first looked at his gun, scratching his head, as if unsure what to do with it now. The man in the bedroom doorway cocked the hammer of his gun.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He burst up through the basement trapdoor, wood splintering, and then immediately grabbed his head with both hands, rubbing his gun against his head injury like a cold compact. The others looked down at him. There was a clicking sound as the man in the bedroom doorway cocked the hammer of his gun.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       The man who'd just came up through the trapdoor was shoved upwards out onto the floor, another man coming up beneath him, and the gun of the one before him went off. The shot rang through the house and everyone immediately raised or lowered their guns to point at him. Hammers were cocked in rapidity, one last clicking sound from the man in the bedroom doorway. Then there was suddenly a crashing sound from the kitchen, and everyone looked up at it, unmoving. I got up, looking at them with a "can I go check?" expression, and they shrugged at me, guns still pointed at the trapdoor men.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       I ignored him and went into the kitchen, where the dishwasher was shaking slightly. The door was straining, and I could hear the sound of breaking glass inside.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       It was the dishwasher door, which fell open with a slam and a burst of steam. He was tangled up in the racks pretty badly, his limbs looked splayed around unnaturally and he was laying across a lot of broken dishes, part of a glass stuck in his ear, some cutlery digging into his back. His gun was held limply in a hand that looked twisted out of position, and he weakly tried to aim it as I looked up at a similar sound coming from the pantry.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He fell out of the pantry in a heap, soup cans and a bag of orecchiette falling out with him. He landed on the floor hard, his gun going off and hitting the oven door.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He rolled out of the oven in a small somersault, bleeding from a bullet wound, already looking partially cooked in addition. I started to back away from the bodies slowly, heading back to the living room-       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       -shoving past him through the kitchen door while he waved his gun in complaint, to find the living room very crowded now. It was almost standing room only. There were a couple of dead bodies now, and the men in the bedroom door were cocking their hammers threateningly, and everyone else was looking at the bodies and looking at each other and appraising whether or not to say anything. "Who-" I said- Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       I shoved him back out and he fell into the entrance hall and shot an overhead light fixture with a bang and a crash.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       Tripping over the man in the hall he fell face first into the living room and shot another gunman in the ankle, who looked down at his injury with an expression of mild confusion, looked at his gun, and then shot the other man in the ankle as if trying to keep up. The men in the bedroom door cocked their hammers.       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       "Look," I said to the latest arrival, as if he were responsible. "I get the point, okay? Sometimes it's best if I just drop an idea if I don't have anywhere to go with it, or adapt it to help some other idea. I'm going to just take a break now, and maybe later I can figure out an ending for-"       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.       He shot me. "Well thank god." I said, and as I slumped into my seat and felt unconsciousness start to come on, I watched the smoke from his gun barrel curl into odd patterns, and he mouthed words at me that I couldn't hear through a rushing sound in my ears. Where, I thought, did I go wrong? How did this all begin? I dimly heard the sound of a hammer being cocked. Everything began to go black-       Just then, a man came in through the door with a gun in his hand.

Snippet: One Giant For Mankind

The new terraforming project was going splendidly, thanks to a combination of ancient DNA and cloning technology.  I stood looking down at what was technically empty space, but by complicated calculations based on the nearness of the sun was that beautiful, magic, invisible ring of habitable zone that our species could thrive in.

"Cloning vat's done, sir." I was told by an orderly.  I looked back at the vast tank with the impossibly large figure in it.  I nodded at them to begin.

We found the DNA in the Scandinavian region, of course.  I forget if it was Norway or maybe Finland.  The latest clone was deemed viable, and the surgical tools moved in to begin.

From the body, first we created the earth of the new planet, flesh into rock, bones into hills, hair into plant life, and then atmosphere from the brains and skull . The blood we spilled to create the oceans.  Everything fell into place and expanded to our exact needs, all according to the calculations of the flesh-to-firmament formula.

A few last touches to the continental shapes here and there from whatever organs and gristle we had left, and voila.  A new planet, ripe for colonization.

"Start up another Frost Giant." I said.  "We've got two more star systems to go this quarter."

Delve, Episode 1: The New Hire

Epub File Here

Now a Fantasy World- your average, garden-variety, starter-kit Fantasy World and up- has to have one very vital thing to start it off right.  It needs one thing before it can fill up with heroes and spirits and mysteries and a complicated totally-unique magic system that your friends will love explaining to you in breathless detail.  It needs a failure.

Otherwise there’s nothing much to do.  For there to be ruins to explore, someone’s got to have ruined them.  Mines must go too deep so they can be properly abandoned and restocked with mysterious terror, past relationships must go sour so that secrets can boil beneath the surfaces of jilted lovers who simmer with frustrated sex appeal, a hero’s parents must die before or during their developmental stages to properly instill them with abandonment issues, and the Dark Lord must be almost vanquished but not quite so that he can come back with a literal vengeance.  

So for a Fantasy to be Fantastic, it needs to have a fantastic cock-up.

And then, the magic happens, and we discover what all these failures were, and the adventure lies therein to fix what went wrong, to stop the return of darkness for good this time, and to get everyone who’s been hiding their emotions from each other to either (A) tearily reveal them or (B) die dramatically and conveniently until the only people left have got their various love interests all good and sorted.  Then, the world continues apace, all the fantastic failures are done, and life can continue with ordinary failures.

That’s the general theme.  People learn from their mistakes, and don’t repeat the failures of history.

That’s why they call it fantasy.

And then, once the adventures are done with and the heroes have settled down and their magic swords have been turned to plowshares, we can leave a fantasy world behind.  It’s settled.  Everyone knows their place.

Unless, of course, you know, people forget, and settle into routines, and start to think the world around them is all there is, all there’s ever been, and the world outside is something that can just be ignored.  Until that world gets ignored so long it becomes something completely new.  Until rediscovery becomes such a forgotten skill, and yet so inevitable, that when it is practiced again it’s bound to result in a few mistakes.

Fantastic ones.

This story starts with an ordinary mistake, that will, of course, lead to discovering the bigger ones.

It starts with a bang.

 God, it’s a beautiful day, he thought.  Vode laid on his back and stared into the blue sky.  Blue, he thought.  So blue!  And clear!  Strange, though.  There should be clouds.

Now why did he think there should be clouds?  Also, why was he laying on his back?  He looked down his body and saw smoke rising off his boots.  Further down from his boots he saw a hole in a wall.  The hole looked very recent, and had smoking pouring out of it, too.  Smoke clouds, right.  Those were relevant, somehow.

He sat up, and saw the whole building that the wall was part of.  It was mildly on fire.  The last few seconds came back to him.

Ah, yes.  He had been blown up.

Well to be more accurate, he had been blown out, and to be more honest, he had blown himself up.  Vode patted himself down, found a few holes in his clothing but otherwise found himself intact, and wondered at what trick of physics had allowed the force of the explosion to demolish a wall while leaving him fairly whole.  But then, if he understood that, he would probably have understood enough to not have mixed those chemicals together in the first place.

Mr. Rensington stepped out of the hole in the wall, coughing and trying to wipe soot from his face with a smoldering rag.  He was a tall, ruddy man, with a curved posture that always made him loom over people like a bent tree.  He batted out small fires on the smock he wore over stained, heavy clothing.  He began to step slowly but deliberately towards Vode.

Vodelian laid back down again, trying to go still.  Predators can sense movement, and he assumed that extended to employers as well.

He had been apprenticed to the master alchemist for the better part of a week, which was a new record.  The time in stonemasonry had ended with shouts from a very angry man with a large brick on his toes, his term ended with the miners by a major accident, and even the ragpickers had decided not to pick him.  So he laid still, and tried to wait this one out.

“I’m sorry, Vode.” said Mr. Rensington without a trace of remorse in his voice, only with a trace of smoke.  “I just don’t think you’re going to work out here.  You’re a bright lad, really, but this requires someone more, well, methodical.  Consider my not charging you for the damages to be your severance pay.”

With that, the alchemist stepped back towards the smoking building, putting out a few last flickers of flame on his shoulders.  Vode stayed laying on the ground, trying to figure out if there was a point to standing up.  Maybe if he didn’t get up, his being fired would retroactively not happen.

Eventually, enough people were walking down the middle of the street that he was laying in that he decided to get up, if only to avoid having his head stepped on.

Vodelian Ragnajiit was short, dark, and sort of handsome in the nervous way some varieties of small dogs are.  He had close-cropped hair and was clean shaven, although it was getting towards the time where a five o’clock shadow was trying to show up against his dark skin.  Along with his clothing, he had all the signs of someone trying to look as clean-cut and proper as possible.  This was his interview clothing, and in fact was some of the only clothing he currently owned.

He was going to get more clothes, just as soon as any employment lasted long enough.  But this city, with its new towers springing up every month, with its fresh brick and surrounding old history, with all its opportunities open, had decided that those opportunities didn’t really apply to Vode.

His initial plan had been to join the great Ostwend Trading Company, which had its headquarters here. Now that was the life.  Go back and forth between exotic locales and watch numbers tick ever upwards on a ledger.  You also got to dress really nice.

But then Vode had actually gotten here and the Company had taken one look at his letter of recommendation and told him he’d have to wait for an opening, and with their current waiting list, they didn’t expect one for half a year.

Half a year.  With no backup plans, and the rent on his new room due, and most of his savings spent on interview clothes.

He had been a flurry of job applications after that, desperate, applying everywhere he could find.  His carefully laid plans for the future, if planning consisted of fantasizing and daydreaming, were suddenly mutable and changeable for any gig that would have him.  Vode would become anything, any walk of life, if it just meant not going back home!

Back home, where his family would be very kind, would nod at each other and welcome him back in, and then a day later would tell him they weren’t running a hotel and they heard that the neighbor’s kid had become a healer, why don’t you do that, it’s a respectable job.  Vode had heard healers had to deal with the sight of blood, so no thanks to that, and he also wanted the satisfaction of becoming something that his parents hadn’t suggested first.

Now he was wandering the streets and the day was passing by and the doors were all closing.  What was left?  Maybe he could join the town guard?  He’d have steady meals and a uniform, then, sure.  But Vode had seen the way the town guards looked at him, and he thought of all the times he’d drunkenly dealt with authority, and he wondered how they’d receive him.  He hadn’t seen too many foreigners in their ranks.

Can’t go back to the room without a promise of rent.  His mind was running in circles.  He started to look at alleyways and the eaves of buildings, thinking of where a good place to sleep might be.

Oh god, am I really thinking that? thought Vode.  Am I going to become destitute?  Homeless?  I don’t even know how to do that!  I’d probably get it all wrong and offend any other derelicts.

Then Vode stopped.  He found himself in front of a building, an old, old building, that looked like it had been passed over by the city’s shining growth.  It hunched its brick shoulders and slumped away into the background of the city, looking sullen at the new buildings and refusing to dance with them.  It had a heavy brass plaque next to its front gate that looked very official and spoke of a long history, but what Vode noticed was a cheap cardboard sign that read:  “HELP WANTED.”

He walked in without another moment’s thought.  He did not bother reading the words on the plaque, which quietly but definitively told the world that this was The Delver’s Guild, est. long ago, To Bring Light Where It Is Needed.

 The foyer Vode found himself standing in looked larger than it needed to be.  Walls of dark smoky wood stretched up to a vaulted ceiling with thick rafters.  There was a large fireplace set in one wall, full of ashy cobwebs.  There were several tables sized for variously sized crowds, but only one table in a corner was occupied by two old men who were either taking no notice of Vode or were quite possibly asleep.  There were some things hanging on the walls, shields, old posters, the head of a beast or two, all covered in dust.  It was a wasteland.

There was also a desk against the far wall with a clerk sitting at it.  She had her feet up and was reading a book.  A door behind her read OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY.

Vode walked right up to the desk and began to speak.

“Hello, I’m Vodelian Ragnajiit, and whatever it is, I can do it.  If I don’t know how to do it, I’ll start anyway and I’ll have learned it by the time I’m done.  I’m a hard worker, I work smarter, and I think my greatest flaw is a terror of wasps, but I will figure out how to get over it if you need me to remove a wasp’s nest.  I’m great at sales, purchasing, customer service, I can lift fifty pounds regularly, I can stand eight hours a day or eight hours a night, and I’m a motivated persevering initiative-taking extroverted people-oriented high-energy team-member with very nearly a food handler’s permit.”

He sat down.  He opened his mouth.  He realized didn’t have something else to say.

The clerk looked at him out of the corner of her eye.  She was pale, with brown hair tied back to control a riot of split ends.

“Alright.” she said.  “Well, we’ll consider your application, and then call you in for a followup interview.”

Vode’s face fell.  “Oh.  Right.  How long will that be?”

“Well.” she said. “Stand up.”

Vode stood up.

“Sit down.”

Vode sat down.

“Well Mr. Ragnajiit,” she said, and Vode was astounded she got his name right on the first try.  “We’ve looked over your application and would love to interview you.  Is now a good time?”

Vode blinked.  “Yes.” he said.

She opened up a drawer in the desk and pulled out a sheaf of dog-eared papers.

“Alright then.  Previous places of employment?”

Vode thought over the last few days.  “Alchemist, mason, miner, janitor, beekeeper-” he winced at that thought- “-carter, uh, barrel… making… person- what do you call that one?”

“A cooper, I think.” she said.

“Cooper, right.   Some other stuff.”

“I see.” she said.  She shuffled the papers, not looking at them.

“How fast can you run?”

Vode thought about this for a moment, and curled slightly in on himself as he tried to work out an answer that looked good. “Fairly… fast enough, I suppose?”

“That works.” she nodded.  “Does your family have any history of mental illness or plans to acquire one?”

“No and- ah, no.”

“Have you ever been shot in the face?”

Vode struggled for a moment, trying to decide if he should ask her to repeat that question.  Surely he misheard her.  But he didn’t want to appear inattentive.

“N-no.” he slowly said.

She glanced at the papers in front of her and muttered something that sounded like “Minimal Experience.”

“Alright.” she said.  “I’ll just go see the boss and I’ll be right back.”

She left the room through an old door, and Vode managed to count to just past ten before she came back out again.

“Well, we’ve considered your application very carefully and we’d like to welcome you to the company.  You can sleep above the kitchen, breakfast is in the morning as long as you help with the dishes, now come with me so you can meet the boss.”

“Oh.  Yes!  Wonderful.  Thank you very much, you won’t regret it.”  Vode felt the words coming out of him automatically, as his brain had a fit trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.  He stood up and began to follow the clerk, but managed to ask:  “Out of, well, curiosity, and just to help me get all ready and able, bring me up to speed and all that, uh... what company have I just joined?”

She smiled a tired smile.  “Welcome to the Delvers.”

 The offices of the Delver’s Guild were mostly quiet and sparsely populated.  The desks were barely separated by thin wooden partitions, which created a sense of division but still left everyone visible to everyone.  There was a sense that the room was built for busier times, to allow rushing bodies to bustle and push past each other, but now it resembled a theater after the audience has gone home and nothing’s been cleaned up yet.  There was an older woman knitting at one desk and looking quite at home, and a desk labelled CARTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT had an ancient OUT sign on it with the requisite spiderweb hanging from its side*.  There were signs of life in the mailroom, which had been rented out as something of a proxy PO box by a distributor of mail-order catalogues and also occasionally hosted illicit dice games.

*In addition to the ability to sense vibrations, spiders also catch prey with a highly-focused sense of comedic timing.  If they did not have webs, they would have banana peels.  This also informs their mating habits.

A desk labelled HUMAN RESOURCES was occupied.

Nilnacular Torkwald had never been shot in the face.  He had a scar along his cheek that suggested otherwise, but the shot had only grazed along his face and never gotten directly in it.  A consummate opportunist, his aim in life was for District Manager, but the District Manager had ducked at the last minute and he'd hit a mailroom clerk instead.

He did not like his job.  Oh, he liked the title, but it required him to deal with people, and he considered people to be the least necessary part of a society.  Human Resources became a lot less exciting when you discovered it did not involve mining or chopping down anybody, and he’d disconsolately had to leave the pickaxe he’d bought at home.

Nil was lean, mean, and blonde.  He sat at his desk, which was piled high with papers to conceal a large number of small weapons, and he hunched over a random, disordered series of procurement reports like a predatory animal.  His eyes scanned over them without reading anything, while trying to hide his constant watchful glances at the District Manager's desk.

The front-desk clerk, what’s her name, Recca, she’d just come in and talked to the Manager.  Nil’s senses were on immediate alert.  Something was actually happening!  Things had been very dull as of late, which had been all feeding into Nil’s master plan to outlast everyone else, take a controlling share of the company, and mold it into his vision.  He wasn’t sure what that vision was yet, but with all the work he’d put into getting to it, he knew it was going to be a good one.

Then a young, dark man came walking in, looked fairly well dressed (if a bit rumpled), and Nil suddenly realized:  A new hire.

He gripped his desk, grabbed a random piece of paperwork, and tried to look like he was reading it as he watched.

 District Manager Dzerdzik Halffast had been shot in the face several times, as his eyepatch suggested.  However the eyepatch was due to an unrelated sports accident.  His chipped tooth, meanwhile, did in fact owe itself to being shot in the face:  He'd grinned at just the right moment and the arrow had been so discomfited by his disarming smile that it had decided "screw this", taken a bit of his incisor, and headed for the hills.

But now he was in management, and he hardly ever got shot in the face any more.

He regarded the new recruit, who was looking a bit nervous.  Dzerdzik gave a big gap-toothed grin, which only seemed to make the recruit more nervous.

“Well now, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Vodelian.” he said.  “Or Vode, if you don’t mind.”

Vode shook his head.

“And y’can call me Dzerd.”

“Um, thank you, mister, um, De-Zerd.”

“Ah, you’ll get the hang of it.” said the manager.  “I’d just like to first of all welcome you to the Delvers.  It’s been awhile since we had some new blood.  Or hell, any blood!”  He chuckled to himself.

“Really,” he continued.  “We could use someone to run some of our fresher errands.  I mean, some of the older staff- well, they’re not really get-up-and-go these days.  And the last I heard from our Senior Field Agent- Recca, just when did we last hear from Drawm?”

“The winter before last, sir.” said the clerk, who had lingered to assist the orientation.

Halffast sighed.  “I figure he’s lost again.  Or maybe he’s finally dead, for real this time.”

“You- you mentioned errands.” said Vode.  He hated to admit it, but he was a little intimidated.  The man in front of him had the build of a canvas sack full of tennis balls, and was at least a head shorter than Vode, but there was something big and tough and confident about him.  He wasn’t much to look at, but on the canvas of the world he sat like a stain, unsightly but ready to put up a fight before it’s gone.

“Just-” Vode gathered himself.  “I think I may be a little unclear on things, but just what do you do here?”

Halffast eyed Vode, and his grin was gone.  He didn’t look displeased or offended by the question.  He was just quiet, for a moment, and then he sighed and leaned back in his chair.  It was the sigh of someone taking a brief rest from a long, long trek.

“Isn’t that a shame?” he said.  “You have to ask.  There was a time when everyone knew what we did.  This city is here because of us!”  He gestured around him, letting the office surroundings stand in for the world at large.  “The Delvers!  We delved.  Into dark places, strange places, alien places, all the places everyone else wanted to go but needed someone else to go first.  Ah!  The things we found, that made kings!  The secrets we learned, that burned old tyrannies to the ground!  With just your wits, a fire, and maybe a sharp object or two you’d go where everyone else feared to tread, see if it was a place worth being, drive out the dangers that lurked there, solve the riddles left as a last puzzling legacy by forgotten peoples, find the forgotten lores of magic, and maybe even get rich.”

He’s going to say those were the days, realized Vode.

“Those were the days.” said Halffast.  “And it was alright, you know?  People got hurt, maybe reading the wrong inscription or pulling the wrong lever gave us the odd earthquake or pillar of fire or two, but overall it was profitable, and it made a difference.  But I guess- well, I guess we ran out of secret places.  Or at least ones worth finding.  Makes sense.  Eventually all the treasure gets found, all the caverns get mapped, all the lost royalty gets saved.  It was all bound to run out.”

Then he just sat there silently, looking into the distance with his teeth showing.

“So now…” Vode prompted.

“Oh, we’re sort of odd-jobbers now.”  Halffast tapped his thick fingers on the desk.  “The set-up we’ve got left is pretty ideal on keeping tabs on lotsa places.  So we run errands, we do surveys, we go get news and reports from places and get paid for the information.  A lot of stuff for governments and… trading companies.”  His voice seemed to slow on that last phrase.  He looked like he didn’t like the taste of it.

“Anyway.” He pointed at Vode.  “I’m sure Recca told you about the benefits.  It’s getting late, your spare place to sleep is all ready, in the morning you can get your first assignment from Nil Torkwald, that fellow over there with the scar who’s been watching us this whole time.”

There was the sound of a panicked flurry of papers from the direction of the Human Resources desk.

“You didn’t ask me if I already had a place to sleep.” said Vode.

“No, I didn’t.”  There was a knowing look.

 Vode settled into a worn cot under old blankets.  There was a wooden footlocker at the end of it, a small lantern next to it, and otherwise the room was fairly unadorned.  It was at least warm from the kitchen below it, and it was a sight better than trying to deal with the rent on his last place.  Here, now, he let himself settle back, his nerves too shot to think about what he was going to do in the morning.

Adventurers, huh, he thought as his brain tried to wind down.  What a strange old curiosity to find.  Well, it would keep him fed for awhile, until he could get a Real Job.  Yes, he’d sleep here for a bit, build up a presence that could get put on a resume, and then an opening in the Trading Companies would surely arrive and he would be off to the world.

He slept.  The world outside waited.

Next:  A Rapture of Raptors

A Clerihew

Calico Jack

Had quite a knack

For raising a flag

That got him ladies in drag.